FOREIGN LANGUAGES
(C)1989 Alan M. Schwartz
During my bumptious survival of public and private education it
was often my task and privilege to interface with foreign
languages. Some collection of strutting administrators with
fractional mentalities (half-wits, or worse) set forth the
expectation that five thousand words and their associated
genders, declensions, conjugations, pronunciations and colloquial
phrases would be deftly shoehorned within my brain to be
available for fluent recall. Want "beggar" in Spanish?
"Pordiosero, mendigante, limosnero," not among the six synonyms
in the English part of my 70,000 word dictionary but definitely
in the Spanish half. I assure you that as a chemist I cherish
being able to pick up a refereed Spanish chemical journal, I
assume there is at least one, and recognizing an obscure or haughty
reference to a beggar. Here we go.
ENGLISH: English was polished by the good, vulgar people of
England while their royalty spoke French. As a consequence of
their fine work and utter disregard for subtle grammatical
nuances, little tidbits like noun declensions, gender, familiar
forms of verbs, and most of the pretentious grandiloquent
bullshit that is so characteristic of the euphonious Romance
languages, were dropped like a warm road apple. The English
language is dedicated to tight, densely woven information
exchange, so much so that when lawyers or doctors want to
obfuscate they go to Latin, Greek, or French. English is a
shameless assemblage of the best of other languages, is difficult
to rhyme, has verbs like hot bamboo splinters under your
fingernails, and may well take over the planet.
SPANISH: Spanish is where irregular verbs go when they retire.
The language has a nice rolling sound without hemorrhaging your
adenoids or your uvula, rhymes are straightforward, and the noun
endings correlate with gender, of which there are but two. It
would appear that if there exists any useful technical literature
unique to Spanish, it has yet to be written. If your kid is
destined to be a technical shaker or mover, nerd or
propellerhead, hacker or wine aficionado, you would do well to
leave an extra space in the Spanish class for somebody else's
liberal arts major.
HEBREW: I encountered Hebrew through the misguided religious
fanaticism of my parents, in deference to my paternal grandmother
(whose actual religious beliefs could be written on the end of a
pencil eraser with a felt tipped pen). Hebrew is 100% phonetic
and, due to a little European revisionism in the 1800's, at least
one spoken version is phonemically identical to German. Never
trust a language whose printed words can be pronounced at least
two different ways. It is possible to fluently read and write
Hebrew without having the slightest idea what is going on with
the meaning -- a most useful attribute given what was being
pushed during religious instruction. Hebrew can be written
without vowels and the original stuff lacked punctuation as well,
about 5% of it being totally lost because the words were only
used once in discovered documents and the context is unclear.
There exists an official State Institute to keep the language
pure. What does that tell you?
GERMAN: With three genders (noun endings do not correlate with
gender), four noun declensions, and five ways of pluralizing
nouns, German carries a lot of baggage. As the verbs are
generally clumped at the end of each sentence, stories of German
lecturers spending forty minutes mouthing noun phrases and
ten more spuming a flood of verbs are not entirely fiction.
German has one outstanding strong point shared with only Arabic
and Bulgarian: You can curse the paint off the broad side of a
barn as a warming up exercise, and set the thing afire with the
main exposition. The pre-eminent German chemistry reference -
Beilstein - is now published in English, underlining the
continuing value of the twelve credits of D and D- German I
suffered through in college.
FRENCH: I never had the distinct lack of pleasure of getting
stuck with French, though it would have come in handy ordering in
restaurants. According to one graduate student who did a year of
French in three summer months, "Pronunciation is French is easy.
Each word is pronounced exactly the way it sounds." Technical
French averages almost twice as many syllables as technical
English to say the same thing, and despite the best efforts of
two native French postdocs we never did find out whether "potas"
was potassium hydroxide or potassium carbonate. There exists an
official State Institute to keep the language pure. English is
successfully infiltrating the spoken language. What does that
tell you?
JAPANESE: I avoided Japanese as well, something of a shame since
they hold the planet as their private economic fiefdom. Japanese
is the quintessential vehicle for relating social status during
conversation. Being both phonetic and ideographic when written,
often simultaneously, Japanese truly represents an intellectual
challenge for the non-native and the typewriter manufacturer. I
suspect that words like "pentaphenylcyclopentadienone," which is
a lovely purple crystalline compound, require some deft mind work
beyond that of mere English when seen for the first time in
Japanese. How does one alphabetize ideograms for a dictionary?
ALL THE OTHERS: Can you program with them? If not, what good
are they?